Tell me what to do with my life!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Because I have no idea, and I’m graduating in a year. Who better to ask than a bunch of random Internet People?

In a nutshell, next year I will be graduating with the following: A degree in ‘Liberal Arts’ (no, seriously. And please stop laughing), a remarkably mediocre academic record, plenty experience in ‘a trained monkey can do it’ jobs, and a huge amount (over 50k) of student debt. In the course of getting my stunningly useless degree, I will have taken four years of math, three of lab science, two years each of ancient Greek and French, one of music, and four years of literature/philosophy. For a far more elegant explanation, click here. It’s been fun, I’m learning a lot, and it’s spectacularly useless for anything outside of academia.

The deferment period on all of my loans has been used up, because I took a year off mid-way. I will owe lots of money. My parents will help some, but their generosity is limited, both by choice and by reality.

So, that’s where I will be next year. Here’s what I want to do with my life:

  1. ‘Make a difference’, ‘help people’, and all that bleeding-heart liberal commie pinko stuff (because I fit that description well). I would prefer to work internationally (ie, helping people in the Middle East or Latin America). Think Amnesty or the AFSC for the general type of work I’d like to get into, though I’m open to a lot of possibilities.
  2. Equally important: make enough money to pay off my loans at least on-time and not starve to death. I’m not looking to make millions, but enough to pay the bills.
  3. Not teach. Kids are not my thing, and I would be a horrendous teacher.
  4. If possible, travel.

So, in the interest of getting honest opinions, I’m going to leave it there for now and not yet say what I think my options with pros/cons are. Given all of the above, what would you suggest I start looking at as my next step?

Disclaimer: Yes, I know, I have created the problem, and I’ll probably spend the next twenty years or so living on rice and canned fruit. I freely acknowledge this and take full responsibility for going down the road I’ve gone down. But that’s where I am, and given the choice between ‘high paying job I don’t like’ and ‘Dole canned fruit salad again for dinner’, I’ll take the Dole. I’m stupidly stubborn that way.

2

Are there any chances of a semi-high-paying job that you can grit your teeth at for a year, while living on rice and beans and paying off a chunk of that debt and saving a bit of money to cover emergencies? In other posts, I’ve followed Dave Ramsey’s advice of paying minimums on debt while building up savings of about a thousand dollars so you don’t have to borrow more when something prangs.

Hmm. Overseas teaching is out, as per your OP. I’m trying to think sideways here.

Have your university studies taught you critical thinking, how to analyse propaganda, use logic to make an argument, use language to stir the emotions, all that stuff? (ISTR that ‘poetics’ and ‘rhetoric’ in the ancient time covered that sort of thing.) These days, all those skills might be turned to marketing or political speechwriting.

Marketing… were any of your previous jobs in retail? Were there any parts of that where you like the products and customers even if the working conditions weren’t great?

Are there any political causes you already support? I’m thinking of very specific stuff like ‘Push for a light-rail line to the northern suburbs’ or ‘Provide a contact centre with phones and secretary so the homeless have a way to be contacted when they’re looking for a job’: causes that have established teams and people.

Can you wrangle a spreadsheet? Writing and doing numbers for such a cause might be a foot in the door.

Are you willing to do physical labour and get dirty?

Can you speak a language other than English semi-fluently? That improves the chances of an overseas job greatly (depending on the language). I know that two years of French wasn’t enough to easily buy a bus ticket in Montreal, but YMMV. Any family connections overseas?

3

The amount of math and science you’ve had to take seems quite impressive for a major outside either of those fields. If you’re looking for anything to help you get a foot in a door, I would emphasize this.

It’s too bad the name of your major is liberal arts, because I think it really gives the wrong idea. Although to be pedantic about it, I think the curriculum you describe is what Liberal Arts is really supposed to be, rather than just another name for the humanities.

4

Granted you are in a different country to me so the situation may be different, but I know of universities that offer some paid tutoring positions for a specific subject (or ‘lab’ positions for some subjects at my uni) to graduates with a good amount of that subject under their academic belt - and sometimes professors etc take on former students as research assistants or whatnot. Could you look into that? If you could get a position like that it could be something to get you by while you try to pay off some debt and look for something you really want to do - I believe the positions are intended to be for one or two years only and then they cycle graduates. Long term positions like that are given to postgrads doing research, I think.

If not that (or possibly as well as that if you’re looking to further your debt-paying off options) then maybe you could advertise as a private tutor for the subjects you are good at? This by itself would probably not bring in enough cash, but alongside something else it may be good.

Is there someone in the arts department at your uni you could ask? Again, at mine, there are several people within each discipline who are designated ‘go-to’ people when you’re wondering what the hell you’re gonna do with your degree. But any professor would probably have a good grasp of the employment options offered by their subject. You may want to talk to them.

All advice should be taken with a handful of salt. I am an undergrad myself.

5

Live your life so people will come to your funeral. Even if it rains.

I would presume few people would regret a few years in the military. If you want to see the world, and change a bit of it, it is a good place to start. I think they have programs to deal with your student loans. (But don’t ask me for details.)

International teaching is not as exciting as it sounds and attracts nothing but oddballs.

6

Is there recruiting at St. John’s? Big companies sometimes come into the good liberal arts schools and recruit people for management training type positions, some of which can be extremely lucrative. It won’t be saving the world, but you will be able to do a lot more good in the world if you get your debt paid down and have some steady income. Talk to the career placement office, and I wouldn’t reject anything out of hand: learn some skills and pay your debt first, and then you can go take those same skills to a non-profit or something.

7

Sales. Become a shit hot derivatives sales person on Wall Street. Pay off student loans with the first paltry bonus.

In a year, the markets might have even bottomed.

8

Train driver? Quite well paid, ticks helping people / altruism box as you’re performing a critical public service, transporting Americans across the country to their destinations. Zen-like qualities as the rail-tracks zip by beneath your feet, filling you with calm purpose and providing a crystal clear sense of direction. Your train is on track, the passengers are happy because they are on track, your life is on track and you will pay off those student loans.

9

Join the US Foreign Service. That’s what I’d do if I had no husband, dogs, or house.

10

Well, clearly many college students have trouble deciding what they want to do when they graduate. Many of them also suffer from delusions and ignorance where they think that “high paying” (usually anything above $45,000 a year) must necessarily equate to “boring tedious cubicle corporate job”. It’s not corporations specifically. Any organization has tedious politics and beurocracies. From what I’ve heard from people who work there, hospitals and social service organizations sound like some of the most frustratingly tedious places to work for (possibly because they are run by stubbornly stupid liberal arts majors with medicore grades who “just want to help people” and not MBAs and other sensible business minded people.)

Forget about “helping people” or “making a difference” whatever that means. There are all kinds of ways of doing that - being a fireman, working for UNICEF, public defender, financial advisior, whatever. What do you actually want to DO day in and day out? Do you like accounting? Digging ditches and working with your hands? Selling to people? Public speaking. First figure out what you actually like doing and then look for places that will pay you to do it.

NinjaChick is not likely to find any job on Wall Street in this market with mediocre grades in liberal arts from an nth tier school and no internships. Besides, she would most likely be using that bonus to pay for a $2500 a month studio apartment.

I would presume that quite a large number of people probably regret choosing the military right now. Plus there’s that whole war thing going on.

11

Have you looked into the Peace Corps? Sounds like it might be up your alley. There are a bunch of international-based initiatives that you could join up with in a volunteer capacity, and many will defer your student loans for you while you’re doing such.

12

Seconded. You don’t need any particular job experience or stellar grades. All you gotta do is pass a couple of exams, for which your educational background has prepared you quite well (the Foreign Service Exam is basically one long game of trivial pursuit with a few more econ questions than normal).

You may not be overly excited about being a mouthpiece for US foreign policy, but that policy might be changing quite radically in the near-term and in your first few years you’ll just be resolving consular issues anyway. It would be good training for NGO international work (though if you want to work for Amnesty, you need to make sure they will still hire you if you’ve worked for the US gov’t, some NGOs have policies against this to prevent spying).

Another thought is to try to work for someone like MercyCorps. They hire college grads and it would be moving in the right direction toward international non-profit work.

There’s always more school!

13

My car could really use a wash, you could start there.

14

Hm, some interesting suggestions (I admit I certainly had not considered being a train driver). Here, for the sake of comparison, is the list I’ve come up with on my own of possibilities (in no particular order), with your suggestions added in:

  1. Peace Corps. Pros: Go and travel, do actual, personal-level work, immersion in another culture, further defer student loan repayments. Cons: They give you enough money to live in a third-world country, which financially, lands me back in the exact same place once my two years are up. Also, you need to live in a third-world country.
  2. Foreign Service. Pros: Decent chance of getting a job. Decent paycheck. Much better chance of a decent-ish living situation. Cons: As stated, mouthpiece for the federal government. I’ve worked a (extremely) low-level job for the feds before, and it served as a good introduction to the insane bureaucracy.
  3. Further education, either law school or a master’s in international relations or public policy. Pros: Law school would be fantastic. Education is both useful and, generally speaking for me, fun. Would increase the chances of getting a job I really want. Cons: Expensive. Assistance positions are harder to get in humanities fields rather than science/math. Unless I manage to get a degree in one year, I’ll be nearly 25 by the time I get started on a career.
  4. Sales/Marketing: Pros: Would probably be easy to get. Would probably pay well, and could serve as a springboard to get some real work on my resume. Cons: Would bore the crap out of me.
  5. Political speechwriting. Pros: I could probably get it (I’m a decent writer). I think I would enjoy it, to a certain extent. Cons: Same as for any government job, I’d imagine.
  6. Military. I actually commented recently to a friend: “I wish there was something like the military, in that they’d train me in a job and give me a position in that field for a year or two, during which I wouldn’t have to repay my loans, but that it didn’t have the moral and political complications of the military. And also, I could quit when I wanted. And also didn’t have things that I’m pretty sure physically disqualify me. And also didn’t have the whole ‘gay people are bad’ thing.” Also, I’m pretty sure if I joined the military, I’d be a file clerk (since I’m a woman who doesn’t want to be an aviator, engineer, or nurse.)
  7. Train driver. Pros: Interesting idea. Cons: Not really what I’m looking to do; I’m thinking more policy or law-based advocacy type work.
  8. Wash KneadToKnow’s car. Nice try, but if I take that route, my parent’s cars get first dibs.

I might be missing some, but that’s what’s at the top of my mind. Looking at the balances of pros/cons, and just what speaks to me, my inclination is that the foreign service would probably be my best immediate option: work for a few years, then possibly get a higher degree, then try to make the switch to the non-profit sector. I wasn’t familiar with MercyCorps, but I’ll definitely look into that, too.

I am planning on taking the GREs in the fall, and how I do on that should also help me narrow down my options (if I do poorly, grad school will at least wait).

15

The good news is that you’re just like 50% of college graduates nationwide, and almost all of them will end up doing just fine. The bad news is that your ambitions are pretty common ones and a lot of the people who share them have no debt, went to Ivy League schools, and can have Mom and Dad carry them while they work for pennies. Washington, D.C. (where most of those kind of jobs originate) is a huge summer camp for trust fund babies. And they have connections.

Your best bet would be to volunteer on a political campaign and make as many contacts as you can, so you can hit them up if their candidate makes it to the Capitol.

My brother joined the Foreign Service a few years ago. He passed the test on his first try, and before he got an interview he earned a PhD, published two books, and worked on the staff of a major national newspaper. It took him nearly 15 years to get in. It is very difficult. Your (anyone’s) odds are better to become a Wall Street bond trader.

16

It depends on a lot of factors. The way the system works is that there is a written test, and then an oral examination. If you pass both, and pass a background check, you are placed on an eligibility list. Hiring from that list depends on how many points you have (for foreign language skills, work experience, etc.).

Among the more important factors is which career track you select. You choose which track you want to enter as an FSO. Some tracks are notoriously difficult, and people languish on the hiring lists for years. Other tracks are much easier, and many people go straight through the process and are immediately hired. As of five years ago, the political track was closer to the former, and the consular affairs track was closer to the latter.

It’s far from a sure thing for even the strongest candidate. But it is a much higher probability strategy than, say, going to law school and finding work in public international law.

17

Your curriculum looks a lot similar to what I had to take to get a BS in journalism from Kent State (minus the journalism classes).

Have you considered doing some sort of foreign correspondent type work for a news agency, or a writer for an international charity? You could help people by bringing their stories to people in other countries.

18

Instead of thinking about what to do next year, you should think about what you want to do in ten years, and work backwards. It sounds obvious but it took me a while to catch on … From the sounds of it my background and interests are something like yours (i.e. I was having this exact conversation with myself when I graduated with my Bachelor of Arts degree).

I was 30 before I started my “career” and I couldn’t be happier with it. (By “career” I mean, full-time, decently-paid job in a field I chose.) It’s rare for people to have a single job throughout their career these days; with a very few exceptions, everyone in my peer group has had at least two different employers since starting their careers.

The ten years before that were taken up with travel (you can get a working holiday visa after you graduate, that allows you to work for a limited amount of time in the relevant country - look up BUNAC for more info), grad school (more on this momentarily), and a string of temp and part-time jobs which paid very poorly and generally sucked, but which (by random chance) proved to be very valuable experience for my eventual “career” job, even though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time.

I can’t imagine how much I could have accomplished if I’d been thinking about this job (or really, any job) when entering grad school (let alone when taking any of those crappy jobs). I could have sought out more specific experiences, and made better uses of the ones I had. (For example, it’s much easier to learn a concept if you have a real-world example of how it works, which you can get either by working, or by having a specific job/field in mind. If you’re just aimlessly doing something because you can’t think of anything else to do, it’s much hard to learn.)

I am lucky that my Masters degree was useful for this job. Pure dumb luck, honestly. Many of my grad school friends are underemployed, or well employed in jobs they could have got without a masters degree. So if you do decide to pursue grad school, make damn sure that it will be directly useful for what you want to do. Also, if you’re a reasonable student, grad school funding is pretty easy to get.

Re bureaucracy: You will find it everywhere you go. I have a businessman friend who hates what he calls “corporate bureaucracy” (i.e. what you’d find in a big corporation) as much as government bureaucracy. But it does have benefits: transparency (you know HOW things get done, even if you don’t know why); accountability (you know who makes the decisions, and likewise who makes the mistakes; this makes life substantially easier); smooth day-to-day business (I have worked in organizations with no functioning bureaucracy and it was total hell - I couldn’t just do my job, I had to do figure out how to do my job (Which of my colleagues do I ask this question? Who makes this decision? What is our policy on XXX? Who sent out this letter last week? I’ve finished this task, what do I do with it? Where is that information I need, it was here a minute ago … and so on).

Less bureaucracy generally means more chaos and disorganization. People who work for non-profits complain about that structure. People who work for small businesses complain about those too. Every organizational structure has problems, and within every organization there are very good people and very bad people. So please don’t write off government/politics just because you don’t like bureaucracy.

Also please note that political jobs (i.e. for a candidate or an elected representative) are quite different from government jobs (i.e. for a ministry or department or or government agency or some such). Political jobs would have much less bureaucracy (but correspondingly more chaos and disorganization, as well as a lack of transparency and accountability; plus you wouldn’t be serving “the public,” you’d be serving the interests of somebody to get elected).

19

msmith537 has a really good point that I’d like to expand on. Your career goals really have two components: your long term goals (i.e., what you want to do with your life), and your short term goals (i.e., what you want to do right now). It sounds like you’re in a similar situation to that of most other soon-to-be-finished undergrads, in that you’ve got a pretty good idea about the first part and no real clue about the second. That’s fine; that’s a normal conundrum to have at your stage in life. There are a couple questions to think about that might help you narrow down your choices:
[ol]
[li]What are your skills and talents? There’s a lot to be said for taking a job that you’ll be good at.[/li][li]What can you not stand doing? There’s also a lot to be said for not taking a job that you hate.[/li][/ol]
Once you have that list, come up with some jobs that match, and start thinking about how they can help you come closer to realizing your long term goals. Take advantage of all the resources your college offers, and the cumulative experience we have here.

That said, let’s talk about grad school a little bit:

Assuming that a remarkably mediocre academic record translates to something below a 3.0, I’m having a lot of trouble reconciling these two statements, and I expect anyone on the admissions committee of a postgraduate program is going to have the same trouble. There are a lot of good reasons to go on for higher degrees, but you need to be aware that the programs are as difficult compared to college as college is compared to high school. If you’re struggling as an undergrad and don’t have a pretty good reason, why do you think you’ll succeed in a significantly harder program? I’m not saying you can’t, but you really need to have a good answer for that question if you’re going to be applying for these programs, or you might as well just burn the money you were going to spend on the application fees.

If you’re serious about considering a postgrad program, talk to the professors at your school. They’ll have insight into your specific situation and the fields you’re looking at going into, and can offer you better advice than we names on the screen.

20

Just so you know, there are a shitload of lawyers out there. Unless you feel you have the ability and drive to get into a top 25 law school and/or be in the top 10% of your class, you might want to rethink.

Really my advice to you, since you don’t really know what you want to do, is apply to just about anything that interests you.

It’s not impossible though. I had very low grades in college but I got into a good business school. But it was also a top 50 University and I ended up in a fairly prestigeous consulting firm through some luck, hard work and personal connections. And my GMAT scores were pretty good too.

Also it’s not that easy to just walk into a job as a social worker or whatever it is you want to do. My friend’s wife has a masters from Columbia in her field and she still finds herself working for some half-wit imbecile in a food bank from time to time.